


Not Such Need To Hide

by Crowgirl



Series: Welcoming Silences [47]
Category: Foyle's War
Genre: Brooding, Established Relationship, Internal Conflict, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-War, mention of pedophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 11:20:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7266046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowgirl/pseuds/Crowgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘Are we men like that, Christopher.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Such Need To Hide

Foyle knocks at his own front door in the spirit of experiment.

It takes a few minutes -- and more than one sharp rap -- for the hall light to come on and Paul’s footsteps to be audible. They’re slightly shuffling, never a good sign.

When he opens the door, he blinks at Foyle for a minute then leans against the doorjamb, crossing his arms. He looks pale, his hair rough and tousled, and his clothes haven’t seen a hanger recently. ‘Forget your key?’

He doesn’t, Foyle decides after a quick inspection, look drunk. ‘I packed it by accident.’ He holds up his small valise as evidence and steps inside. Paul gives way silently and turns back into the sitting room as Foyle sheds coat and hat. He looks for Tweed but doesn’t see her until he follows Paul into the sitting room. She’s on the settee, front paws tucked under her chest, watching Paul with an expression they’ve dubbed her ‘spinster schoolteacher’ look. She perks as Foyle comes into the room, standing up to butt against his hip until he strokes her and then resettling herself against his side when he sits down.

Paul is in his armchair, his right leg stretched towards the fire, a half-full glass in his hand. There’s a bottle on the carpet beside the chair; Foyle can’t see the label in the dim light and, of course, it could always be cold tea or something equally innocuous but he doubts it. Were positions reversed, he could guarantee it wouldn’t be. 

Paul has slid down in the chair, letting his head rest against the back, his hands loose on his stomach cradling the glass. He looks rather like a loosely sewn stuffed toy thrown down without plan. 

‘I read about the case,’ Foyle says as it becomes clear Paul is not going to speak.

Paul laughs. ‘Oh, good, we made the London papers. Wonderful.’ His voice is hollow and he doesn’t look at Foyle. He takes a long drink from his glass and adds, ‘Just what I was hoping for.’

‘I’m to give you Hilda’s congratulations. She followed the story quite closely.’ And without drawing it to Foyle’s attention for the first few days but he feels certain that isn’t a mistake she’ll be making twice.

‘Mm.’

‘She handled something similar when she was first at the department,’ Foyle goes on, leaning forward casually and picking up the bottle. He tilts it towards the fire -- the only real light in the room -- and sees a plain white label with a few words written in Mrs. Wallace’s slanting hand: _e.d.v. ‘46_ ‘Said she would have sent you a bottle of her best whiskey but she didn’t have any to hand.’ 

Paul lifts his glass and toasts an absent Hilda Pierce. ‘Home supplies.’

‘So I see.’ 

There’s silence in the room as Paul empties his glass and leans forward, holding out his hand for the bottle. Foyle keeps it for a minute, then sighs and pulls out the cork. ‘Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?’

Paul sets his glass on the hearthrug, shoving himself to his feet with some effort. Foyle refills his glass and the second Paul brings from the sideboard and puts the bottle down near his own feet.

Paul drinks silently, cupping the glass between his hands, staring at the fire. Foyle takes a sip then wishes he hadn’t: whatever Mrs. Wallace has created this time burns like raw spirit, something he hasn’t tasted since his first days with the force. Once the burn passes, there’s a pleasant fruity taste, almost sweet, and even a little smooth but he isn’t sure it’s worth a second taste.

‘She calls it _eau de vie_ ,’ Paul says, shifting his weight slightly and sliding down further in the chair. ‘Says a friend sent her a recipe from the south of France.’ He takes a sip from his glass and adds, ‘I think she might mean she got the recipe from the Wheatsheaf.’

Foyle takes another mouthful and lets it burn his tongue for a moment before swallowing. Mention of the Wheatsheaf case is another bad sign; Paul never refers to it if he can avoid it. ‘Paul--’

 _‘Men like that,’_ Paul intones, waving his glass along an invisible line in the air and punctuating the line with a stab of one extended finger that makes the liquor slosh in the glass. 

‘Excuse me?’

 _‘Men like that_ was what the Brighton man said to me. _Well, you know how men like that are._ It was in the Hastings newspaper -- the London one, too, I’m sure.’ Paul shrugs, taking another drink. ‘Perhaps they called it something more guarded. _The homosexual menace?’_

‘Paul--’

‘I didn’t see the article. You’ll have to tell me.’ 

Foyle pinches at his eyes. He hadn’t planned on a train journey today; true, his day had been mostly meetings and some rather dull reading, but then Hilda had pointed out the article in an evening paper just as he was on the point of leaving.

 _‘The silent threat to our post-war families,’_ Paul intones and makes another gesture with the glass that nearly sends liquor splashing onto his wrist. ‘Perhaps that’s what they can call it.’ He takes a sip and adds, ‘Well, something like that, anyway. That might be a bit much.’

‘Paul.’

‘The boy will be all right.’ Paul’s voice changes, sounding almost as if he’s telling himself. ‘The boy will be all right. Sterling hadn’t --’ Paul’s mouth twists harshly and he empties his glass. He looks for the bottle and, before he can see it, Foyle simply holds out his own glass. Paul takes it, downs half of Foyle’s drink, and goes on, ‘Sterling hadn’t done anything more than scare the hell out of him. He’s back with his parents--’ Paul squints at the mantelpiece clock. ‘--oh, definitely by now. Safe and well back at home.’ He takes a further mouthful and savors it for a minute.

Foyle leans forward, putting his hand on Paul’s knee, trying to bring his attention back to the present. He knows how the mind will linger over the last scenes of a case, fitting the work of the previous days together in endless combinations in an attempt to make the whole thing have gone faster, ended better. 

In this case, the child, a twelve-year-old schoolboy from near Sunderland, had been missing for three days before the parents had even reported him gone. They were under the impression that he was gallivanting with a school friend to a concert near London. It was only when the school friend was seen walking home and, when asked, disclaimed any knowledge of his friend or the concert that they realised there was a problem. Foyle knows the last two weeks must have been something out of a policeman’s personal hell: the frantic parents come down to the last place their boy had been seen; the out-of-town officers called in; the endless repeated searches-- 

Foyle could kick himself for having lost track of things so badly. ‘Paul.’

Paul blinks and looks down at Foyle’s hand on his knee. He brushes Foyle’s knuckles with his fingertips and traces a slow line down the back of Foyle’s hand to his cuff, then shakes his head. ‘Are we men like that, Christopher.’

Foyle makes his voice as firm as he can without actually sounding like he’s giving an order and slides the glass out of Paul’s hand. ‘You know as well as I do that men like Sterling are not suffering from an unacknowledged passion for the man next door.’ 

Paul’s mouth twists again. ‘Not what the newspapers say.’ He closes his eyes and lets his head fall back against the chair. ‘You should be careful up in London, I hear. Strange men lurking behind every bush--’

‘Does Valentine look as if he goes around lurking behind bushes?’ 

‘Only very well-groomed ones.’

‘Well, then.’ Foyle leans forward again, covering Paul’s hand on the arm of the chair with his own. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t hear sooner. I would have come down--’

‘You couldn’t have.’ Paul’s voice is lifeless, his eyes still closed. ‘Not without some reason.’

‘I would have come down,’ Foyle repeats, and goes on, ‘or called or--’ He can’t think of any other options and falls back on: ‘You should have told me.’

‘Told you what? Paul moves his head a little restlessly and, without opening his eyes, lifts one hand, drawing a fingertip along as though writing on the air. ‘Dear Christopher, Lovely weather we’ve been having. The new gutters are working splendidly. Sorry to tell you that the local nancy boy is--’

‘Paul--’

‘--acting up and it looks like I’m going to have to arrest him.’ Paul snorts and drops his hand. ‘Just what Hilda wants to be reading, I’m sure.’

‘She doesn’t read my mail, I’ve told you--’

‘Well, she will after this, won’t she?’ Paul opens his eyes and looks at him. ‘What the hell did you _tell_ her? I’d gone missing? The house was on fire?’

‘I said that I had changed my mind and I was going to come down this weekend after all. She gave me the message about the whiskey and that was the end of it. She seemed -- quite sympathetic, really.’ At least as sympathetic as that well-practiced sphinx expression of hers ever gave away.

Paul says nothing and closes his eyes again. He looks paler than when he opened the door and something in Foyle’s chest aches to think of him going through all of this on his own. He can guess which officer Paul’s referring to -- an older man named Willett who has been on the verge of retirement as long as Foyle’s known him. He’s not one to be guarded with his language, very likely to chunter on until he simply bored himself into silence. 

And he’s sure that Willett, the local papers, probably even the parents if they weren’t simply too relieved to have their boy back to say anything, had adopted the same tone of moral righteousness as the London paper: _a hidden danger in our post-war communities, insidious and often too late recognized for what it is,_ and on and on and on. All language Foyle has been familiar with since he was a child but nothing he had ever taken personally. It wasn’t _him_ on the page, it wasn’t any man he had known -- it was someone sick and wrong with a damage that didn’t show on the surface.

And none of this -- not one tiny fragment of it -- helps him right now. He studies Paul’s face for another minute, then pushes himself to his feet. ‘I’m going up.’ 

Paul lifts his head and looks at him blankly, almost as if the words don’t make sense to him.

Foyle holds out a hand. ‘Come with me.’ 

* * *

‘Good lord.’ Foyle stops in the door of the bedroom and Paul, just behind him, sighs.

‘I haven’t been home a lot lately.’

‘No, I -- I can see that.’ The unmade bed, blankets and sheets pushed to one side, pillows in an untidy heap, is the obvious giveaway; unless he’s ill or called out in the middle of the night, Foyle has never seen the morning where Paul doesn’t make up the bed immediately after dressing.

‘And I wasn’t expecting you.’ Paul steps around him and starts picking clothing off the end of the bed, making a pile of shirts and ties over his arm. 

The room reminds Foyle of one of the last times Andrew had been home from school many years ago and he had been searching for some piece of clothing in the depths of his wardrobe. The resulting flurry of clothes had looked much the same. There is slightly more pattern here: shirts are mostly at the end of the bed, there are two pairs of trousers, one with a bad stain around both cuffs, hanging over the edge of the hamper as if they hadn’t had the energy to get all the way inside it. 

‘It -- I -- sorry.’ Paul sits down heavily on the end of the rumpled bed with his armful, gazing at the room as if it presents an insurmountable puzzle. 

‘It’s easily fixed.’ Foyle takes the pile of clothing from Paul’s arms. He doesn’t bother sorting, just dumps everything in the hamper: socks, pants, vests, shirts, anything he comes across that can go in, does. It can all get sorted out tomorrow. A jumper he folds and drops on the dressing table; Paul’s dressing gown goes back on the hook behind the door beside his own, the more comfortable one he leaves here. ‘There. Simplest problem I’ve had all week.’

Paul looks up at him, his expression blank, and nods slowly. ‘Yes, I should’ve-- I was going to clean tomorrow--’ He stops abruptly and presses his hands over his face, shaking his head.

Foyle crosses to him and crouches down in front of him. ‘Paul. Stop.’

‘Sterling’s in jail tonight,’ Paul says, driving his hands back through his hair and then letting them fall on his thighs. His eyes are overbright but Foyle knows better than to mention it. 

‘Where he belongs.’

‘But…’ Paul stops, biting his lower lip hard enough to turn it white. _‘Why?_ Why him and not me?’

‘Because you don’t kidnap children.’

‘But -- Christopher, it’s _exactly_ the same--’

‘Like hell it is.’ Foyle’s patience isn’t at an end so much as it is fraying slightly at the edges. He pushes himself to his feet. ‘What stops it being you or me is that neither of us are paedophiles. I’ll thank you to stop comparing yourself to one. Or me, for that matter.’

Paul scowls down at his hands but says nothing. 

‘The man broke the law, Paul -- if it had been a twelve-year-old girl, it would still have been illegal.’ Foyle slips off his coat and drops it over the back of the dressing table chair, adding, ‘It just wouldn’t have been as much of a draw for journalists.’

Paul mutters something under his breath and starts undoing his shirt buttons.

‘What?’ 

Paul sighs and, pulling his shirt out of his trousers, says, ‘It isn’t fair.’

‘No. It isn’t.’ Foyle undoes his waistcoat buttons and turns back to take Paul’s shirt. ‘Many things aren’t.’

They finish undressing in silence, Paul piling their clothes onto the dressing table chair for lack of any other space. He hands Foyle a clean pair of pajamas from the wardrobe and pushes the doors shut. Foyle feels the weight of tiredness resting more and more heavily as the moments tick by and his fingers feel stiff and stupid as he tries to do up his pajama buttons.

‘Here--’ Paul pushes his hands aside and does them for him, his fingertips a warm brush against the skin of Foyle’s chest that, were he less exhausted, might be a stepping stone to other things. In the morning, perhaps. 

When he’s done the last button, Paul rests his hands on Foyle’s shoulders, then pulls him into an embrace. Foyle goes willingly, closing his eyes and letting his cheek rest against Paul’s shoulder where he can hear the steady beat of Paul’s heart and smell the faint tang of his skin. He links his hands together behind Paul’s back and lets himself drift, rubbing one thumb against the thin fabric of Paul’s vest to feel the slide of skin beneath. 

It’s an unexpected pleasure to be here; he hadn’t planned to come back home until the end of the next week. Now it feels rather like a stolen treat, something he should be quiet about in case speaking makes it vanish. He knows he has this feeling in the back of his mind more than he should: that Paul is somehow such undeserved good fortune that Foyle needs to be careful. Realistically, of course, he knows this is ridiculous. It isn’t as if he and Paul haven’t fought or argued and he knows they’ve both had days when they questioned whether this -- this house, this room -- was worth the effort. But, whether or not they talked about it explicitly, he also knows they have both continued to come to the conclusion that it is. They have always come back _here._

He hears Paul take a breath before he speaks, his collarbone rising against Foyle’s chin. ‘It isn’t -- it isn’t _right_ that we get lumped in with Sterling. Willett just kept... _everyone_ kept talking as though they knew what I thought and, of course, I agreed with them. Even if I didn’t, if I wasn’t--’ Paul pauses, takes a breath, and then goes on, ‘People still try to sympathise with me over the divorce and -- God, I just want-- I don’t even think about it any more. I never think about it. And I can’t say _anything--’_ He pauses again and continues, more slowly: ‘You and I have...have been together longer, I’m -- I'm _happy_ with you, and -- I can’t --’

‘I know.’ Foyle pulls back far enough to cup his hand around the back of Paul’s neck and pull him down to kiss. He rests their foreheads together, not letting Paul move too far back. ‘I know.’

**Author's Note:**

> Eternal thanks to my betas [elizajane](http://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane) and [Kivrin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kivrin).
> 
> Title from _King Lear_ , [Act I, Scene II](http://www.bartleby.com/46/3/12.html) which is particularly amusing if you happen to know the [1982 production](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084208/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_38) of _Lear_ wherein Michael Kitchen plays Edmund, the other party in the scene I pulled the title from. It's an excellent production if you can get your hands on it.


End file.
